realpath failed -- error uninstalling ports

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 2, 2009, at 18:31, Dexter Douglas wrote:

> I am running Leopard on a PowerBook G4; Xcode 3.1.2; macports 1.8.1.
>
> "port uninstall" was working just fine until 1 Oct.  That is when I  
> performed a selfupdate to 1.8.1 and then upgraded all my outdated  
> ports.
>
> After the upgrade, I tried to clean up by uninstalling the inactive  
> ports.  That is when I got the error message.
>
> I have two most likely unrelated pieces of information.
> 1) During the upgrading, doxygen failed to compile.  I ended up  
> uninstalling and trying to reinstall.  I was not able to reinstall  
> doxygen.  2) I suffered from the "MacPorts 1.8.0 deletes ${prefix}  
> if it is a symlink" problem (http://trac.macports.org/ticket/21082).

The realpath command was added to MacPorts in 1.8.1 specifically to  
fix the symlink problem described in 21082.

What is your MacPorts install prefix? Is part of your prefix still a  
symlink? If so, which part, and where does it point to? Is there  
anything else unusual about your prefix -- is there a space or any  
other special character in it (or, if it's a symlink, the place it  
points to)? Is it on a different disk than your startup disk? Anything  
else you can think of that would make your MacPorts different from ours?

And if you can rebuild your MacPorts with the change Joshua suggested  
and let us know what it says, that could help as well.